Arc is released

As one or two of my readers may know, Arc is a project by Paul Graham to produce a new Lisp/Scheme dialect for the future. Up till now details about it have been very sparse, but today the first version was released.

Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn’t have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn’t distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn’t have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn’t support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there’s also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers.

Sounds like a combo of JavaScript and Common Lisp to me, though I’m slightly disappointed about the (current) use of ASCII as the only charset.